Wake up to a Smarter Alarm
Do you get tired of waking up to wacky morning DJs, annoying radio banter, or harsh buzzing alarms? Then check out Smarter Alarm, which can wake you up, inform you of the events of the day, and get you out of the Sandman's realm armed with information you can use.
The free version of the app can wake you up, read the current temperature, report headline news, let you know which of your Facebook friends have birthdays that day, read a custom RSS feed, notify you of new Gmail, and inform you of unfinished tasks you may have left to do in Google Tasks.
If you like the product and want to purchase the full version for about $4USD, it will read you quotes, give you "this day in history" facts, recite your calendar events for the day, and tell you how your favorite sports teams fared.
The voice is a little bit too robotic for my tastes, but you can download other voices if you want to purchase them from a third party company, although one does wonder if those are any more fluid. Then again, perhaps a bit of grating robotic morning speech is just what is needed to get the gears in motion.
If you happen to have a dock for your HTC EVO, it can replace your dock mode default if you want it to.
This application has quite a few features, but notably missing is the ability to play some sort of lead-intro melody (although I guess you can rig a ringtone) and options to force you to prove you're awake to shut it off for some of our deeper-sleeping EVO owners.
Download: Google Play